


No Dominion

by LilydaleXF



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Angst, F/M, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-20
Updated: 2016-04-20
Packaged: 2018-06-03 12:04:13
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6610024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LilydaleXF/pseuds/LilydaleXF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Through death, they lived and loved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	No Dominion

**Author's Note:**

> First posted August 28, 2002, three months after The Truth aired. The story starts with the season 2 abduction arc and runs through The Truth, going AU after that (i.e., I Want To Believe and Season 10 don't happen here). I recently re-read this story after many years and thought I'd share it again by posting it at AO3 for the first time. I really hope you like it.

The first time she died, he was surprised how much he cared. He'd only known her for a year or so, but missing her rattled him deep.

He didn't know exactly what to think in those restless months. He hoped she was alive. Maybe she would walk in one day, safe and sound into the basement office, and complain about how the everything bagel he was eating was going to make the room reek of spice all day long and how she hates it when that happens.

"Don't you realize that every time you eat one of those things in here and leave the bag in the trash it not only makes the whole room smell like onions for at least the rest of the day but it sets off the radar for every bug in this entire building so that they crawl through the rafters and make a beeline to your trashcan? And that's assuming you finish the whole thing. Last time, between your leftover half a bagel and giant gobs of lox cream cheese I practically had to scrape ants off my shoes with a ruler after walking in this room. Are you even listening to me?"

He'd just stare. Bagels usually inspired a lot of talk. She was probably jealous as her breakfast repertoire included a boring array of fruit. Every day she brought in one piece for breakfast. Bananas at the beginning of the week, apples at the end. Red apples in the winter, green apples in the spring. Occasionally she brought in something tropical, something more unusual, and he'd wonder what the special occasion was. Maybe on the day she came back and complained she'd have a fresh fuzzy peach.

She would wait for him to respond, tilting her head in his direction as if she could direct some of her smarts straight from her brain to his. He'd tip his head to show that he was paying some sort of attention, wad up his empty bag, and nonchalantly toss it across the room into the trashcan closest to her. It would land with a rattle and a soft, fragrant plop. She hated that too. Maybe that day would be the day she'd pick up his mushed, stinky bag and throw it right back at him. Yeah. That would be the day.

"The least you can do is bring it out to the hall," she'd say as he caught the abused bag against his chest. "Building maintenance may not come in here on a regular basis, but I don't think they have become so afraid of the basement that they'll stop coming down here altogether. Although getting a whiff of that bag might be the last straw."

"Day old banana peels don't smell like roses either, you know."

"And you'll note that's why I stopped leaving them in here after we figured out that maintenance avoids this room as much as possible."

He would offer her one exaggerated eyeroll and saunter out of the room, freeing her from offending scents and letting her win that battle. It would be her first day back, after all.

He hoped that day would come, complete with splattered lox cream cheese and digs at his spooky office. His only other experience with a mysterious disappearance - abduction - of someone close to him hadn't ended well. Or ended at all.

Guilt consumed him those months that Scully was gone. She wouldn't have disappeared if it weren't for him. So in guilt he thought about bagels and fruit. And football. He thought a lot about football.

He thought about that crazy scientist they met in Alaska and listened to every football game he could find, occupying his scared, overactive mind by cataloguing all the great football plays she missed. Football was always on, the perfect comfort and distraction.

At first he listened to games on the radio, in the car, at home. On a portable stereo through headphones that he started carrying around with more reliability than his badge. (On more than one occasion Skinner demonstrated admirable restraint by not physically yanking the headphones off his head.) Listening to the games, he would take mental notes of stupendous plays and humorous blunders. Miles and miles of his cranial tissue got congested with rushed yard stats, penalty kick percentages, and abduction roadblocks.

Eventually, though, he turned to TV. The radio's words weren't enough. Sometimes his mind would wander away from the monotony of the sportscasters' cheers and jeers and he'd stare into space, his eyes getting pulled like gravity toward her spare umbrella propped up in the corner of the office or at the mug she used the last time she was at his apartment. He needed visual stimulation, so whenever possible, a TV was on. Flying leaps and tossed coolers of alien green sports drinks were added to the architecture of his mind, building defenses for him and memories for her.

He ordered a special package from his cable company so that every football game played in the US, college or professional, was a remote control click away. He had to order a bunch of other channels too, but even those came in handy at times. The US might not schedule football games at 2 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, but Australia did, so Aussie Rules football became an acceptable substitute for his usual football fare. He never did understand all that business about bouncing and touching the odd-shaped ball to the ground every so often when it was much easier to throw a pass, but he catalogued notable plays anyway.

All these football games consumed his life. He still worked, of course, and that meant missing some games while he was on the road and up to his knees in ectoplasm. He took to programming his VCR to record promising games.

The cinnamon gum chomping girl at the video store down the block started to recognize him. The girl would ask, "Are you sure you just want the three pack? They're cheaper if you buy the bigger packs." "No," he'd say, week after week. "I might not need many more." The girl would shrug her shoulders, shake her head in that teenage way that said Old People Are Nuts, and ring up his three pack of videos while bursting cinnamon bubbles inches from his face.

When he saw a Super Bowl highlights tape on sale at the video store for $1.99 he had to buy it for Scully even though he wasn't sure she'd ever get to see it. He never even unwrapped it, just stuck it in a cardboard box that he slowly packed with tapes bought in threes and filled with great games. Cataloguing football plays for her had become his life while she was gone, and it made perfect sense to him that when he handed her that tape in her hospital room, it could be her reason to live too.

After she came back, every football game he heard made him think about her. He bought Redskins season tickets every year even though he was only in town for a handful of games.

\--o--o--o--o--o--

The first time he died, he was buried in a charred boxcar.

Walking to her mother's house the night she thought they had both been defeated, she held her head high. Her eyes pierced the darkness, succinctly scanning her surroundings as she learned in her training, while her mind wandered so haphazardly and at times so distantly that she probably couldn't have told you what city she was in. She exuded the aura of a confident and alert woman that nobody in their right mind would want to confront, walking the cool, near-deserted streets alone and coatless.

Her feet started to hurt about fifteen minutes from her mother's house. Was it fifteen? It was when she was stuck at an intersection with a constant stream of cars crossing in front of her, forcing her to stall her zombied walk. Where were all these cars going? Didn't they know that they were in her way?

Blocked, she thought about inertia: a body that's in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted on by an outside force. Inertia helped mask the pain of her feet. Apparently. She hadn't noticed her throbbing heels or swollen toes until all those damn cars impaired her inertia.

She eased her shoes off, held them both in her left hand, and waited for the cars to pass. As she crossed the intersection, the rough asphalt of the road prickled the soles of her feet. Little stones and twigs blown onto the road from the surrounding suburban yards pressed into her skin, hurting like glass.

No, she reconsidered, not quite like glass.

One of her physics teachers once walked across broken glass. The shards shined under the classroom's fluorescent lights, tinting the front row, her row, with an array of oranges, browns, and greens. Two boys behind her debated how many six packs their teacher had to drink to create a glass path of such great length and width. The glass walking was supposed to demonstrate force per unit area. (The more surface area in contact with the glass, the more distributed the force is across that area.) Her teacher took careful, flat-footed steps across the entire length of glass rubble without receiving so much as a scratch.

Much like how her partner fell on a bed of nails and cracked a joke instead of breaking the skin. Had that happened only three months ago?

She continued walking barefoot, taking care to keep her steps flat and her weight evenly distributed.

Arriving at her mother's door, she stood up straight, her eyes wide and focused. But when she saw her mother's concerned face, she crumbled and cried. Her mother put an arm around her shoulder and led her to the living room couch.

Quiet then, save for an occasional sniffle or murmur, she let her mother bring her tea, envelop her in fierce hug after hug, and talk about her father. It was all meant to comfort her, erase that crease in her brow, make her feel loved. But her mother couldn't possibly understand. The only person who could listen to Scully's silence and know was gone.

She held her mug up to her mouth and tipped it, but nothing came out. Her face must have crinkled and shown childish dismay because her mother reached out for the cup and said, "Here, honey, I'll go make you some more."

Her mother came back from the kitchen holding a steaming mug that said "F.B.I." in bold yellow letters.

Scully noted that teardrops in tea made two ripples before disappearing.

\--o--o--o--o--o--

The second time she died, she was invaded. She came too close.

If not for him, she wouldn't be putting up a strong front or trading time in the morgue for time in the oncology ward. Her working morgue time, he meant. How rich, how ironic. His fingers tapped the steering wheel and his lips curled upwards into a shadow of a smirk when he thought that, but he crushed it. How dare he allow himself the luxury of even a split second of humor, of enjoyment, when she lay with darkened eyes and sunken cheeks in a cold, impersonal hospital room.

Technically, she wasn't in that room yet, but she probably would be. Soon.

At the moment, he hoped she was home. It was a weeknight, and instead of heading home after work, he drove around the city, watching tourists look puzzlingly at maps as they tried to find their hotels, wondering who were hidden in the cars with black tinted windows, and eventually stopping for Chinese food. He had inexplicably ended up a few blocks from Scully's apartment, so he bought twice as much food as he could eat and headed for her place.

She hardly ate anything anymore. He tried to ignore it. Tried not to care.

He tried not to notice that she stopped getting the soup and salad combo for lunch and just went for the same small size of one or the other. He tried to rationalize that she ate her breakfast fruit before he made it into the office and that she threw away her peels and cores in the metal trash bin with the rounded lid and hinged opening that kept out prying eyes. He tried not to let it bother him that her nagging reminders to stop and pick up dinner before darting off to hunt potentially paranormal beasts had all but ceased. He tried to stop wondering if she was too sick to have an appetite and too proud to say anything or if she was beginning to give up the pleasure of meals and simple indulgences in some sort of self-inflicted punishment or defeat.

He tried all those things and failed across the board. He tried to ignore that too.

She let him in her apartment with a surprising supply of enthusiasm. She even gathered plates and glasses with a smile. Maybe she'd just been waiting for him to care.

They sat across from each other at her kitchen table. Neither spoke for at least five minutes. He ate all the food he'd served himself and the whole egg roll he'd stolen from her. His chopsticks rested on his plate, their tips doused in a pool of whatever that brown sauce stuff was that made the cashew chicken taste so good.

Her plate was considerably more full, though she still held her chopsticks. She'd been pushing and poking at a few chunks of pineapple covered in electric red sweet and sour sauce for at least a minute. Maybe she decided that since he was done it okay for her to stop the pretense of eating. She set her chopsticks on the napkin next to her plate and started to reach for the plastic-wrapped fortune cookies in the middle of the table.

"Hey, you know the rule is no dessert before you've cleaned your plate," he mock chastised as he sat up a little from his chair and lunged to stop her cookie grab. Perhaps he lunged with a bit too much gusto.

As he rose, his left hand reached across the table while his right hand lowered to the table for balance. He achieved balance but not before the edge of his palm hit the ends of the chopsticks dangling off his plate, sending them into an end-over-end twirling flight path across the room. As they kicked off his plate, some of that tasty brown sauce stuff spurted straight in the air. While the sticks flew, they flicked sticky brown droplets in swirling, all-encompassing loop-de-loops. It would have been quite an impressive show had it not involved her kitchen, his error, and sticky brown goo, now liberally dotting her table, floor, ceiling, counter, and cabinets.

Her attention diverted, he scooped both cookies up from the table with a triumphant grin. He noted that she did not return his smile.

Still leaning over the table and holding the cookies, he apologized. "Oops. Sorry."

Looking around the room with a blank expression, she said, "It's going to be really hard for you to eat all this sauce before you're allowed to crack open those cookies." Her eyebrows rose and her mouth moved into a ghost of a grin. Making a mess of her kitchen and probably having to clean it all up himself was worth it for just that twitch of her lip.

He acted playfully stoic. "Well, remember the rule is about cleaning my plate before dessert. My plate is much cleaner now, you'll notice, so these cookies are mine."

"I don't care," she sing-songed, as she let a smile erupt and reached across the table (without putting her hands down, he noticed) and snatched the cookies right out of his hand. "I think I deserve these."

There wasn't much about that he could argue with. He sat back and watched as she broke into both cookies and devoured them nearly whole before gravity had time to ooze any brown goo down her cabinets. Her ferocity amused him. It wasn't like he was going to try reaching across the table again anytime soon. And he certainly wouldn't do anything to put any damper on this display of appetite. He would flail his food around more often if this worked.

He hadn't dared to wish for this spark of enjoyment, but he was supremely pleased that it happened. Somehow in the ridiculous, lively instant of drippy brown goo and cookie inhalation it hit him that she wasn't going to die. He did dare smile and think that.

\--o--o--o--o--o--

The second time he died, he killed himself. At least, that's what they wanted everyone to think.

"I can't lie," she pleaded. "Nobody will believe me." The sun shifted, and a ray of light filtered through the window. She lowered her eyes and shuffled a rock-scraped black shoe across his hardwood floor in a lazy tap dance. An unseemly number of dust mites swirled around in the morning light.

He was already looking at the floor. Fascinating, distracting dust. "Please," he said, "it's the only way."

"Even pretending you were dead would be too much," she said as her hand pulled his out of his pocket. As if pulling his hand was like moving a lever, their eyes raised from the floor in unison, meeting each other's. Their eyes locked for some time, her pale pink fingers wrapped loosely around his trembling wrist, the hum of his fish tank the only sound.

He didn't even have any fish, but the pump ran just the same, bubbling cleanliness and life potential into the empty tank. He had been too busy tripping back memories and disturbing his brain to worry about dropping a week-long fish food pyramid into the tank. She'd told him time and time again to stop buying canisters of fish flakes altogether and stock up on those little pyramids. Just in the last year alone he killed almost the entire cast of Star Wars.

"George Lucas better hurry up with the prequels because I'm running out of characters," he had said as he scooped Lando out of the tank and she watched him from the couch. Or, rather, as she spied on him from the corner of her eye as she sorted through security camera photographs on his coffee table from some "haunted" house in Maryland.

"You could stop buying fish. Or maybe you could buy some of those--"

"There are only so many names left that're fit for my personal use."

Not even bothering to balk at his complete interruption of her (she was sure he knew her point and that her raised brow was in his peripheral vision), she asked the obvious. "Fit?"

"Everyone's fine except Vader. And the Emperor. I'd be crazy to intentionally bring dark lords into my apartment," he said without missing a beat, as if it was the most obvious thing in the world. "Even if being here would ensure their destruction and the salvation of the galaxy."

She smiled and stayed planted on his couch, keeping her fingerprints off the photographs while he dripped Lando's burial water onto the floor.

When Mulder died this time, she'd have to make sure he left with plenty of food. The fish weren't the only thing he forgot to feed when he was on a mission.

Her fingers slipped down to his, squeezed them gently. "You'll know the truth," he whispered. One of his feet was nervously shuffling now too, their toes brushing up against each other as sunshine and dust shackled their ankles.

"Yes. Yes. We're getting so close."

"And when we're closer, I'll be back. We'll be closer."

"I know you will. That we will. But you..."

"I'll be safe. You take care of you." Her gaze fell back to the floor, not wanting to think that there was anything about herself that needed taking care of, not wanting to see the concern and care in his eyes.

She untangled her fingers from his loose, secure grasp, traced her fingers down his palm so softly that maybe he wouldn't quite notice that it actually happened. She nodded her down-turned head, and walked toward the kitchen, trailing a comet of dust.

The next time she stepped into his apartment and saw a man in his clothes, it was shockingly natural for her to don an empty face, a muted tone, and seal their shared lie on the way to the truth.

\--o--o--o--o--o--

The third time she died, they'd shot each other with ghost bullets and left crawling red trails on the floor. Afterwards, they spent the night together on his couch, stirring his stuffy apartment air with flying wrapping paper and yuletide giggles.

"It's so cold in here! Is your heat even on?"

"Yeah, but it can take a while for the place to warm up. I keep the heat off a lot since I spend so much time in other people's houses running into ghosts, getting killed, and whatnot."

She made no verbal response, just gave a hint of a smile and tucked her feet a little more snugly into a blanket. When he had his feet tucked into it, the blanket barely reached his waist, but on her the blanket ebbed across her legs and pooled around her hips with fringe to spare. She towered over him in so many ways that seeing subtle size reminders like her skeleton resting alongside his under the floorboards or his blanket draped across her body always shocked him with a little jolt of incredulity. She filled so much of his world.

"Here, I'll make us some tea."

In the kitchen he made clomping noises while scrambling for tea stashed up high in his kitchen shelves. Then he poked his head into the living room. Grinning like silly, he exclaimed, "Did you just hear that drumming of hooves? I think reindeer have arrived on the roof!" As quickly as he appeared, he popped back into the kitchen, clanging cups and heating water.

"Well, I hope the reideer are carrying some peppermint tea because that would really hit the spot," she called out to the absurdly childish and demented man impersonating reindeer in a barely lit kitchen in the middle of the night. He wasn't fooling anyone, but the point wasn't deception. Tonight they were alive.

He walked back into the living room carrying a steaming mug in each hand and holding a plastic bag by his teeth. Setting the mugs on the coffee table, he opened his mouth and dropped the bag onto her lap. He offered her kisses. "I thought that chocolate would go well with the peppermint," he said.

"Good call," she noted with appreciation.

They sat together on his couch, sipping tea and eating chocolate. They didn't speak much. For amusement they balled up the little foil wrappers and tried to toss them into each other's cups. He kept missing on purpose. She really should not have worn the tempting shirt with the deep v-neck.

She pretended to accidentally drop a chocolate kiss onto the floor, sliding further to the middle of the couch, to him, in her rescue attempt. It made it easier for him to cheat and miss her mug, but she didn't care.

She also didn't mind that she was so tired later that morning at her mother's house that she fell asleep sitting cross-legged in front of the tree while Manheim Steamroller pulsed in the background, kids yelped about the greatness of Santa, and she had only opened two of her presents. Her mother cared, whispering her name and jabbing her gently in the back with one of her brother's new golf clubs when her head started to tip dangerously close to a dangling glass ornament shaped like Winnie the Pooh. Scully turned around and smiled, handed her mother her empty mug, and grabbed a star-shaped cookie from the coffee table. She preferred tea and kisses, but coffee and gingerbread would do.

Her brother barreled up the stairs from the basement after retrieving batteries and swearing that everyone should remember in buying gifts next year that toys without batteries are as appealing to kids as pairs of socks.

Hearing boots pound on the stairs made her exclaim to no one in particular, "Hooves! The reindeer are here!"

"Did you bring up any batteries for your sister? I think she needs a recharge," her mother said, being less subtle with words about her daughter's distraction than she was with a golf club.

Across town, Mulder reclined on his couch long after he should have been asleep, toying with a silver kiss above his head, twirling it between his two forefingers. He would open it, but he didn't know what he'd do with the wrapper. Instead, he untangled his legs from the small blanket she'd been using, rolled off the couch, and wandered over to his bookshelves. He set the kiss on a shelf next to his fish tank. "Merry Christmas, Wicket and Wedge. Merry Christmas." Shaking his head back and forth as he walked to his bedroom, he said again with a smile, "Merry."

It wasn't a tradition they necessarily wanted to repeat every year, but pseudo-death agreed with them that Christmas.

\--o--o--o--o--o--

The fourth time she died, someone took her place. He had thought her irreplaceable.

He visited her in the hospital after that photographer traded her death for his. He held her hand, talked about seeking death's opposite. He glared at the nurse who came in to take Scully's temperature right as she began to ask about that opposite.

He talked through the temperature taking and other status checks, changing the subject because they were no longer alone. An extraordinary number of flower arrangements filled her room, and that seemed like a good, neutral subject.

"Where did all of these flowers come from? I've only brought up two bunches. Three, tops. The guys never send flowers because they say florists can't keep away all the bugs." At that, her eyes twinkled with amused knowing. "And I think that...guy who shot you is too afraid to bring anything near you that may cause you to so much as a sneeze." Her smile faded a bit, but she knew that he was talking more about the flowers and trying to cheer her up than making a judgment on the very distraught and very censured man who shot her the week before. "Then there's you," he said with a sneaky tone and lilted eyebrow. "When did you have time to hobble around and gather all these flowers from rooms with sleeping occupants?" He winked and gently squeezed her hand, suddenly acting near-oblivious that someone else was in the room with them.

"I'm used to keeping strange hours. Other people sleep, I lurk about darkened hallways." Her eyes softened as her mouth turned into a subtle smile that nobody but him might have noticed. She moved her hand in his in what was probably meant to be a return squeeze but turned out to be a tiny slide of joined hands across rough hospital bedding. The back of his hand rested warm against her blanketed thigh.

The nurse loudly flipped a page over on her chart and let out a disapproving groan. "You know you're not supposed to be spending much time on your feet yet. Especially alone. I do not want to see you outside this room or outside this bed unless I or another staff member is with you."

Donning what he hoped was a stunning smile, he turned to the nurse and said, "We were just kidding, ma'am. The flowers are mostly from her family. I assure you that you don't need to worry about this patient wandering about the halls or breaking any rules."

His smile broadened as he noticed that Scully was clearly trying to contain her shock at his schoolboy-proper attitude. He usually wasn't on his best behavior in hospitals, as a patient or as an intruder, but that didn't mean he wasn't familiar with hospital rules and overworked staff. And when he needed to cater to both.

"Very well then." The nurse set down her chart and exited the room.

"That was unexpected," Scully said earnestly before the squeak of the nurse's shoes on the polished floor was out of earshot.

"Well, uh, it's true. And you need your rest so you'll be able to go home on that accelerated healing schedule you've once again surprised everyone with. And you're certainly not going to start upsetting the staff now. Or risk a delay in going home by roaming the halls or by getting out of that bed at all unless absolutely necessary."

"Not with you here."

That embarrassed him. She wasn't chiding him for protecting her usually headstrong self, nor was she resenting the fact that he spoke to the nurse when she was perfectly capable of doing so herself. Or angry that his seated position blocked her path out of the bed. Rather, she sounded grateful. For recovering quickly and well? For him on her bed?

"No," he said in what he hoped was not a tone that reflected the strange combination of shyness, confidence, and compassion beating through his body. "Not with me here."

He kept on talking about nothing in particular after that. Death's opposite was hidden away for another day's exploration, the moment lost.

At some point in the middle of his based-on-actual-events recap of his near-deadly morning encounter with a disgruntled hospital squirrel that tried to stake a claim on his bag of sunflower seeds, she fell asleep. It wasn't that his story was boring, he told himself, it was that she needed her rest and that she felt comfortable enough to take it, to let her guard down, when he was around. He slid his hand out of hers, gingerly trailed his fingers up her side, over the blankets, in what he considered to be a mere tucking in. Everything dies, he thought, but hopefully nothing in this room (except the possibly contraband flowers) would die for a long, long time.

He stood up, reached into his jacket pocket, and pulled out a small bag. On his way to her room he had stopped at a vending machine near the end of her hallway. He was going to buy a pack of Wint-O-Green Lifesavers because he liked hearing her science class explanation of why they sparked when you chewed them, and she'd been keeping her hospital room so dark that the sparks would probably be quite visible. But two rows up from the candy rolls a bag of silver caught his eye, and he bought that instead.

Quietly opening the bag, he peered in and counted his riches. There were enough. He moved over to her bedside table and started to play with his food.

He was gone when she woke up, but there was a pyramid of chocolate three kisses deep on her bedside table. One hand drifted to the pile while the other rose to her mouth, her fingers running lightly over her lips. He had left her kisses. A pyramid of sustenance.

\--o--o--o--o--o--

The fourth time he died, she buried him.

This time it was real. Choosing floral arrangements, dripping out tears, getting dirt on her hands real. Forever real.

She spent most of her time at his apartment the week after she returned from North Carolina. Being in her own home somehow made her feel more lonely, more like a failure. Nobody called, nobody came over. It was just her, the incubating baby whose existence she still hadn't fully accepted, and a few fish that she hated simply because they were alive and could obliviously swim.

He'd strayed from the cast of Star Wars before he disappeared. The three fish in the tank now were part of the Disney clan he started after their trip to Hollywood and their Disneyland drive-by. Huey, Louie, and Dewey. They'd lasted awhile, probably because she's been the one looking after them for most of their lives.

She chastised herself endlessly for not looking after him enough.

Time passed like a crazy clock, flying and stalling in erratic spurts that coincided with her irregular moods. Days and nights ran together. Sleep came and went with no relation to the rise and fall of the sun. Eventually, she made herself get out of his bed. She told herself it was because she was healing - healed - and not because she had been there so long that her scent finally overtook his.

She shuffled over to his dresser, pulled a t-shirt from a middle drawer. She'd been in his apartment for three days, so the small packed bag she kept in her car trunk had until now provided enough clean clothes to keep her from rummaging through any of his things. The t-shirt in her hands was one of his, although she saw two of her shirts resting in the drawer. When had they found their way there?

Oh, yes. Pastrami.

"Who doesn't like pastrami? That's un-American," he said as he poured about a thousand calories worth of potato chips into a plastic bowl and set it on his table next to the plates of offending sandwiches.

"I think that's taking it a bit far. A lot of people don't like pastrami. And I am one of them."

"Ugh. It's just wrong. How could I have been around you for so many years and not know about this pastrami thing?" Despite his disgust, he plopped down right next to her on his couch, thoroughly invading her space.

"I don't like corned beef either."

"That's basically the same thing."

"Exactly. So you knew about my pastrami thing," she said with a self-congratulatory smile.

Rather than verbally admit defeat, he stretched for the bowl of chips and handed it to her. "Well then, enjoy your dinner." He scooted both sandwich plates in front of himself and smiled.

She rolled her eyes. It wasn't outside the realm of possibility for him to have made pastrami sandwiches for their late night meal knowing full well that he would end up with both of them. It wouldn't be the first time that he stole one of her meals. But there wasn't room for such melancholic memories. There was room, however, for mockery. "You really know how to treat a girl. Such riches. Thanks."

"Anytime," he said with a giant grin and a puffed-out cheek, full of pastrami. This man could be so excruciatingly, beautifully maddening. "What's mine is yours."

Remembering a time not so long ago when she found herself in his apartment with nothing to wear, she tried to lightheartedly shoot back, "Except clothes. Nothing you have fits me."

He stilled for a beat, mouth agape, sandwich-holding hands hanging a few inches from his mouth. Perhaps that wasn't the best thing to bring up. He recovered quickly, and if she hadn't been looking at him as he spoke, she might have missed his pause altogether. "That's fine by me." He added a full body leer at the end of that, obviously catching her initial meaning but deciding to put it in a softer light, one that they were much more presently interested in and one that toyed with their old but new power of innuendo. She decided to take that lush, overtone-laden road too, only slightly annoyed at herself for diverting from that road in the first place.

"Yeah, I'm sure it is," she said as she stood up and placed the chips bowl back on the table. "But that doesn't mean I shouldn't be prepared in the future. Prevent a pastrami-like disaster the next time I'm here late at night without anything decent to wear." Walking over to her bag in the hallway, she pulled out two shirts, and went into the bedroom to thoroughly invade his dresser space.

It felt like she left her shirts here a lifetime ago, she thought. Perhaps, in a way, she had.

She went to the closet to grab a blanket before she left his bedroom (his place was often so cold). A big cardboard box sat in the corner. Curious, she pushed aside some of the dress shirts hanging above it and unfolded the box's top flaps. How exasperatingly him. He had a sizeable collection of unlabeled videotapes in a box tucked a closet corner.

In a throwback to that time years before when she spent hours watching someone else's videos and getting brainwashed, she hunkered down with a wave of apprehension to submerge herself in whatever he had deemed fit for recording. She watched a lot of football that week. She never remembered him talking much about football, but he obviously liked it. Even that Australian football with the absurdly tall goalposts. From then on, she liked football too. Almost as much as she liked baseball, but not quite.

\--o--o--o--o--o--

The fifth time she died, she died already in love.

She gripped his back in a frantic, desperate hug as she lay covered in blood on his dusty wood floor. They didn't speak. He held her tight, just holding her warm body. Warmth meant life.

Still holding her, he broke the silence after an unknown number of minutes. "We'll have to call the police soon, if someone hasn't already. You want to clean up before they get here?"

"No," she said as she tried to pretend she wasn't still in the throes of tears. "I think everything should stay as is until the police can check everything over. We shouldn't disturb the scene." Her hands kept rubbing his back near his shoulders as if he was the one who almost just had his insides psychically expunged, the one who needed reassuring. It occurred to him that maybe she just didn't want to let go. That, he could understand.

Even though he knew that he should get up and call the police, he didn't. When sirens sounded a few minutes later, he was relieved that he stayed on the floor getting blood all over his clothes, developing a cramp in his bent neck, holding her.

After the police came, questioned, re-questioned, and left, Mulder and Scully stood in the spot in his apartment where they had crumpled a couple hours before. She looked herself over and announced, "I'm a mess." He nudged her in the direction of his bedroom. Given the momentum, she walked into the room and out of his view.

When she walked out of his bedroom about a half hour later, clean in one of his white t-shirts and a pair of his workout shorts, he stopped his walk from the kitchen to the living room and reminded himself that she almost died in his apartment just a few hours ago. Missing this moment in time was almost unfathomable.

"Thank you," she said, looking down as she lowered herself to sit between his desk and coffee table.

Her hair fell into her face as she sat. Her hands rose and pushed not-quite-dry hair behind her ears. It curled at the ends. He could count on one hand the number of times he'd seen her hair that untamed.

His shorts and shirt were so large on her that when she sat cross-legged, he could only see her bare knees poking out from under the fabric. From where he stood, the pale color of her knees contrasted sharply against his dark furniture and brown floor. The way her knees looked reminded him of peaches, and he briefly considered how the skin on her knees would feel against his lips.

He couldn't remember ever seeing her sit on his floor before. Or on any floor. She looked comfortable there, at home. Almost relaxed. His mind was probably playing tricks on him given the confusing hell she'd just experienced.

She leaned over and put her elbows on the coffee table and rested her head on folded hands like they were a pedestal. Her head sunk into her hands, bending her fingers down into a "U." Any sculptor would have been overjoyed with such a model visage. But it was for him she posed and allowed the view.

"I got extra cheese," he announced.

She tilted her head up and quirked an eyebrow at him.

"I, ah, ordered a pizza. It should be here soon."

Extra cheese was the only way he could respond to the absurdity of her thanking him when she was the one who fought in his apartment and now lived and breathed there, wearing his clothes and looking like a dream.

\--o--o--o--o--o--

The fifth time he died, it was the death of his spirit. She knew because hers almost died too.

He didn't pack his spirit in one of his new suitcases (lightweight, for travelers on the run), but he carried it away with him despite his soft insistence that she hold it.

They stood facing each other in her apartment, close, with their arms around each other's waists, talking very softly, his back to the luggage. He effectively blocked her view. Sometimes their size difference wasn't the awkward inconvenience they had imagined it might be.

"You keep it. For safekeeping," he said. "It'll ache away from you, and maybe if it stays here there will be nothing left in me to hurt, and you'll have something that won't allow anything to hurt you. Or the baby." She started to open her mouth to protest, but he didn't let her start. "I'll get it back when I see you again." The import of the definite word "when" did not escape either of them.

She adored his spirit and thought that if she could eat, drink, and breathe nothing else for the rest of her life, it would be his spirit, and she would be forever full and alive. Maybe it was the same for him because he slowly shook his head and traced his lips down her jaw as she whispered, "The only way I'll safeguard your spirit is if you'll carry mine."

They knew deep down that spirits must mingle to nourish each other.

His mouth hovering at the dip between her chin and neck, he sighed. "No, I...I can't do that. I can't take that from you."

She placed one hand over his heart, fingers flared like a star, and echoed his words. "You wouldn't be taking it. It'd be for safekeeping. I'd get it back."

She could feel his smile against her skin.

"Sometimes I hate you," he said through kisses that dotted the side of her face. It riled him when she made sense and called him on his own words, but even the things he hated about her could make him smile and sting him with belonging. Yet, he was about to leave.

She tilted her head more to the left in hopes that he'd continue his trail of tiny wet pecks down her neck. "And sometimes I hate you." The words came out all slurred and distracted. Her hand slid from his chest and up to his shoulder, held on tight.

They stood in silence for a few moments, with him taking her lead and trailing a damp line of kisses down to her collar. He started to make a return trip, but he stilled when she turned her head and placed her mouth on his neck. She hovered there, her lips slightly apart and just brushing the surface, her breath heating his skin. She felt his fingers curl at her hips. After placing three soft and lingering open-mouthed kisses in a row, she lowered her head and set it on his shoulder. He reciprocated the kisses and pulled her just a little closer.

"Okay, then. I guess I'm all packed."

As he walked out her front door, his kisses still tingling on her face, she swore she could see his spirit trickling from the soles of his shuffling shoes. She stood still.

\--o--o--o--o--o--

The sixth time she died, it was a bigger surprise than usual.

They'd spent years running. Chasing demons and being chased. They weren't sure of their precise direction, but they knew that it was taking them closer to the truth. Taking everyone closer.

Newly reunited, they only stayed in Roswell a day or two, mainly out of a mutual, unspoken decision that physically letting go of the other one was a complete impossibility.

"Tell me you're really here," she whispered to him over the hum of the air conditioner and the patter of rain that fell their first night on the run. "Tell me you're really here," she said again as one hand tightened over his hip bone and the other curled around his neck.

"Open your eyes and see."

She remained still, eyes unopened. The most movement in the bed was his jackhammering pulse, beating strong against her soft fingers. He couldn't be more here, feel more alive.

"No. Tell me."

"I'm here," he said, matching her soft, relief-slurred tone and strengthened grip. The air conditioner took that moment to buzz loudly and shake vehemently enough to rattle the window pane. The mood broke slightly. "The UFOs must also be here now, raising a ruckus. I guess word got out that we're in town." He drummed his fingers on her side as part of the tease.

She tensed up. Her body became wooden.

"Hey, hey, I was kidding. You know how the AC is in places like this."

"Not places like Roswell. Places we are."

He didn't know what to say to that. A half hour in this room and he'd already said the wrong thing.

She shifted on the bed, pushing against his hip, her other hand slipping from his pulse to a spot more behind his head. Propped up a little so she could see his face, she spoke. "Things are different now. No, don't get that defeated look again. Different for good, different for bad. It's a matter of circumstance and perspective. And we are alive, we have information, and we do have hope. There's danger, but there's also determination. Right now, my perspective is good."

"You're looking right at me."

"And in spite of that view, my perspective is good."

He couldn't help but to mimic her smirk and quickly pop up, sliding his legs on either side of hers and holding his arms straight with his hands on either side of her head. His movement flopped her back onto the bed, her long hair fanning out in every direction on the yellowed motel pillow. He stared at it, at her, realizing with marvel where he was and where they were. "I'm here," he told her, running his fingers delicately down her cheek. "And I'm not going anywhere."

So much had been said between them in such short periods of time. In all the years they spent together, what they perfected most may have been the ability to pack each second as if every clock tick could be their last.

A touch of his hip, a ruffle of her hair. Two days of mingling before they finally gained enough confidence in their reality and in the gravity of their situation to leave Roswell.

Six years passed of straight-line, global traveling, with them optimistically thinking of forward motion though they knew that they sometimes moved back. Sometimes they felt safe. Sometimes they wondered how they'd survive another five minutes in this whirlwind of secrets and lies. At least they were fighting together. Always.

A few weeks before the sixth time, in December 2008, they returned to a rented cabin near Yosemite that they found soon after leaving Roswell. California, they discovered, was a nice, well-connected place to hide and plan. And the San Diego field office had a pleasant open door policy for them that never ceased to amaze their skeptical selves.

They were walking downstream one morning on a randomly scheduled trip the back way to buy some food, shoelaces, and batteries. Boring things. A giant beetle kept fluttering by his left ear, paying no attention to his clumsy swatting, evasive hopping, or cries of "Go away!"

Amused, she laughed and smiled, providing absolutely no sympathy or assistance. "Die, bug, die!" she offered between chuckles.

He raised a pitiful eyebrow at her. "That's." (Swat) "Not." (Jump) "Very." (Jump) "Helpful."

Her laughter kicked up a notch, and she tugged on the hem of his flannel shirt to keep her balance while whimsically tripping over her own feet. The wind picked up, tossing hair into her eyes as she beamed at the man beside her between strands of flying curls.

The wind continued to churn, get angrier. Their revelry stopped, the beetle forgotten, as the sun seemed to explode in a flash of white light and the ground undulated in a way very unlike an earthquake. Thrown to the ground, they rolled off the crude path and into a damp, shallow sinkhole, crushing oblivious bugs in a twisted sort of revenge and bouncing off a variety of roots and rocks along the way. She lost her grip on his shirt, but they stayed together like two tossed magnets.

The world stilled, teetering between now and forever.

It's four years too early, they both thought.

"We were so close to never seeing this happen."

"Maybe alone we're just not enough."

"But we're not alone," he said. "We're together."

He held her hand as they lay on the ground, their joined fingers resting on her abdomen. Her thumb tapped an erratic pattern on his knuckle. It wasn't words, it wasn't Morse code, but he understood what she was saying, what she wanted him to do.

He brushed back her hair with his free hand as her eyes closed and her breath faintly brushed over his temple in their cramped quarters littered with broken twigs and caterpillar-plundered leaves. Her hair still burned red; that much never changed. He tipped his head to hers, their bruised foreheads touching, their noses in an Eskimo kiss, as the sky exploded into a fiery kaleidoscope of bitter orange and black.

The sixth time she died, he died too.

**Author's Note:**

> "Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion." -- Dylan Thomas
> 
> Giant mounds of gratitude to Emma Brightman and Jesemie's Evil Twin for helpful beta, kind encouragement, endless patience, and indulgent doughnut runs.


End file.
